How chronic self-views influence (and potentially mislead) estimates of performance.

@article{Ehrlinger2003HowCS,
  title={How chronic self-views influence (and potentially mislead) estimates of performance.},
  author={Joyce Ehrlinger and David Dunning},
  journal={Journal of personality and social psychology},
  year={2003},
  volume={84 1},
  pages={
          5-17
        }
}
An important source of people's perceptions of their performance, and potential errors in those perceptions, are chronic views people hold regarding their abilities. In support of this observation, manipulating people's general views of their ability, or altering which view seemed most relevant to a task, changed performance estimates independently of any impact on actual performance. A final study extended this analysis to why women disproportionately avoid careers in science. Women performed… 

Figures and Tables from this paper

Skill Level, Self-Views and Self-Theories as Sources of Error in Self-Assessment

People’s impressions of the quality of their performances are often surprisingly inaccurate. In this paper, I discuss three specific factors that contribute to error in self-assessment. First, at a

How chronic self-views influence (and mislead) self-assessments of task performance: self-views shape bottom-up experiences with the task.

Perception of an objectively definable bottom-up cue (i.e., time it takes to solve a problem) was better predicted by a relevant self-view than the actual passage of time.

Effects of Standards on Self-Enhancing Interpretations of Ambiguous Social Comparison Information

When people receive feedback about how they and others have performed on a task-feedback that should be interpreted as implying equivalent performance-they only seem to exhibit a self-enhancement

A rational model of sequential self-assessment

A rational model of sequential self-assessment is proposed which allows to make predictions about each individual separately—unlike in the one-off case which looks exclusively at the population level—and to identify, in addition to bias and sensitivity, the extent to which individuals’ beliefs are responsive to their most recent evidence over the course of a task.

Faulty Self-Assessment: Why Evaluating One's Own Competence Is an Intrinsically Difficult Task

People’s perception of their competence often diverges from their true level of competence. We argue that people have such erroneous view of their competence because self-evaluation is an

How Social Norms Promote Misleading Social Feedback and Inaccurate Self-Assessment

Self-assessments are often prone to error. Past research has identified cognitive and motivational biases that lead self-assessments astray. In the present paper, we discuss how behavior shaped by

A Simple Model of Self-Assessment

A simple model is developed that describes individuals’ self-assessments of their abilities and predicts that if communication is imperfect, then (i) appraisals of others tend to be too positive and (ii) overconfidence leading to too much activism is more likely than under confidence leading totoo much passivity.

Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight Among the Incompetent.

Positivity bias in employees' self-ratings of performance relative to supervisor ratings: The roles of performance type, performance-approach goal orientation, and perceived influence

As hypothesized, data from two field studies among employees and their supervisors showed that employees are more likely to positively bias their self-ratings relative to supervisor ratings when
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 89 REFERENCES

Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability.

Are you what you feel ? The affective and cognitive determinants of self-judgments

Subjects recalled an affect-eliciting event that had occurred to them in either an achievement situation or an interpersonal situation. Recalling a positive or negative achievement experience (for

Global Self-Esteem and Specific Self-Views as Determinants of People's Reactions to Success and Failure

A critical question in self-esteem research is whether people's reactions to success and failure are guided by their global self-esteem level or by their more specific beliefs about their abilities

Self-serving biases in the attribution of causality: Fact or fiction?

A review of the evidence for and against the proposition that self-serving biases affect attributions of causality indicated that there is little empirical support for the proposition in its most

Unrealistic optimism about future life events

Two studies investigated the tendency of people to be unrealistically optimistic about future life events. In Study 1, 258 college students estimated how much their own chances of experiencing 42

Self-Esteem and Memory for Favorable and Unfavorable Personality Feedback

The accuracy of people's memories for personality feedback depends on their level of self-esteem and the favorability of that feedback. In two studies, participants were given feedback that was

Depression, realism, and the overconfidence effect: are the sadder wiser when predicting future actions and events?

Depressed and nondepressed Ss in 2 studies asked to make predictions about future actions and outcomes that might occur in their personal academic and social worlds displayed overconfidence, that is, they overestimated the likelihood that their predictions would prove to be accurate.

A threat in the air. How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance.

  • C. Steele
  • Psychology
    The American psychologist
  • 1997
Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups, that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.

Ambiguity and self-evaluation: the role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability

When people are asked to compare their abilities to those of their peers, they predominantly provide self-serving assessments that appear objectively indefensible. This article proposes that such

The Accuracy-Confidence Correlation in the Detection of Deception

A meta-analysis was conducted of research on the relation between judges' accuracy at detecting deception and their confidence in their judgments, and confidence was positively correlated with judges' tendency to perceive messages as truthful, regardless of the actual truthfulness of the messages.
...